Guns Don't Kill People, People With Guns Do
By Michel Stone
February 24, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
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When I
was a young man, my best friend from college
and I were riding on the subway, traveling
over one of Manhattan’s famed bridges. The
City in those days was in bad shape,
homeless people everywhere, pornography,
prostitution and worse at 42nd Street and
spilling over, garbage strikes, debt piled
to the ceiling, crime rampant, etc., etc.
My friend observed that everyone predicted
the City would soon collapse. And then he
said this: “Maybe the City has already
collapsed, and nobody noticed.”
Today my friend’s question recurs. Are we on
the brink of collapse in the wider society?
Or have we already collapsed, and are we
just unable to comprehend the fall?
The Stoneman Douglas school in Florida. Like
countless school shootings before it, it
summons an orgy of hand-wringing. The
obvious first move is to ban guns. But that,
of course, is ruled out of order in a
country that produces and sells more arms
than any other and means to continue. Useful
idiots invoke the 2nd Amendment, subtler
propagandists blame mental health, a subject
they advert to on no other occasion.
Congress collects its shekels, and nothing,
but nothing, is done. Money calls the tune.
If we produced nothing but nutmeg, and if
nutmeg could kill, bet the farm no law would
touch nutmeg.
But no one really thinks about the impetus
to kill. Why would a mere schoolboy steel
himself to kill indiscriminately? It’s not
enough to say he’s insane. That merely names
our ignorance. Of what nature is the
insanity that would strike out against
unoffending, anonymous fellows?
There are some indications. This was a shy,
diminutive lad, perhaps bullied at school.
Denied a biological father and mother, he
was fortunate to have adoptive parents. But
only one of them, the mother, was with him
from early childhood to 2017, when she too
died. Yet strangers tried to help him, took
him in on the strength of their son’s
friendship with him. Enrolled him for the
GED, found him a job, even took in his
arsenal on a promise that it would be locked
away.
Yet he killed. Even joked about it
beforehand. “I’m a professional school
shooter.” He said he hated blacks, Jews,
immigrants, Mexicans, liberals. He found
places on the internet where these views
were not condemned, or were applauded. It’s
possible, I suppose, that when he went into
his old school, Stoneman Douglas, from which
he’d recently been expelled, there were
particular people he aimed to kill, those he
may have felt treated him badly.
But I doubt it. The list of victims seems
indiscriminate and accidental, many of them
14 years old, children he likely did not
know.
So what is it? Perhaps we deal only with a
symptom, and only one, of a societal
collapse that is already well under way. And
perhaps the engine of this collapse is the
same as the engine of our imperial project,
returned home to roost. During the Vietnam
War, our generals claimed the Vietnamese
lacked our respect for human life. We would
have to fight with redoubled viciousness to
stop such beasts. Of course we did—and lost
the war. It turned out it was the Americans
who lacked respect for human life.
The sins of empire always return home, which
is why no republic survives its own
empire-building. American values, for which
our politicians constantly congratulate us,
decreasingly include respect for human life.
Avarice and consumption are, increasingly,
the only American values. There is a tipping
point in this calculus which heralds the
collapse of society. And we are past it.
Examples abound. Grinding poverty which is
not even spoken of anymore. Thousands of
deaths at the hands of a thoroughly
monetized “health” care system. Education
available to fewer and fewer students, whose
studies are rewarded with crushing debt,
never to be discharged in bankruptcy. More
prisoners—in absolute numbers—than any other
country. Obscenely draconian punishments,
followed by a stigma which promises civil
and economic death to the penitentiary’s
survivors. Police posted in every school.
The scant old-age protection of Social
Security stolen from those who purchased it
with a lifetime’s sweat, turned over to the
arms makers and their bankers. Delirious,
hallucinating patients dumped in the street
by health care workers for the crime of
indigence. Racist police killings spiraling
without end. Massive incarceration and
disenfranchisement of black and brown
citizens. Brutal austerity measures for the
poor, cutting school lunches, cutting food
stamps, cutting Headstart.
Each one of these examples, a tiny sample,
teaches the same lesson: human life is not
valuable; empathy, unmonetizable, is
worthless. Success is a zero-sum game.
Capitalism is murder.
The purest strain is still exported. In
Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and dozens of
other places, the lesson is direct: human
life is to be blasted and droned out of
existence. The civilian death toll is never
counted. Americans have no idea how many
foreign noncombatants have died in our wars.
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But
the lesson is learned, even if never talked
about. Young men venerate and emulate
soldiers. They want those military-style
weapons. They become expert at war game
simulations—and in turn are recruited by a
military that means to use those simulations
in real time. “Enemy” lives are merely
points in the game.
The military post mortem analysts of World
War II were astonished and dismayed to learn
that many of our soldiers did not actually
fire their weapons, but faked it, because
they could not bring themselves to kill
their opposite numbers in battle. (The
training changed for Vietnam, where
fresh-faced conscripts were first taught to
hate the slant-eyed gook, see him as
non-human, therefore easy to kill. By now,
the lesson is well-learned, practiced in all
our foreign wars, and, increasingly, by our
domestic police.)
And so the practice of the empire comes
home. Bigotry, racism, and xenophobia are no
longer out of bounds. Quite the contrary.
They provide a welcome release for the
hopelessness and despair coined by the new
economy of disappearing alternatives. And
the young, of course, are the most
vulnerable, as neuroscience teaches us that
the brain is not fully formed in the early
twenties, emotional control is not yet
stabilized. Fear and hatred are sharper,
quicker to turn to violence against the self
and others, driven and justified by every
war crime, every domestic cruelty.
Thus, the stage is set for the final cruel
irony. In schools, theatres, concerts,
churches, social gatherings of any stripe
all around the country, Americans are
learning what it is to live in a state of
war. We’d almost forgotten our last
experience, in the Civil War, of being under
siege, of trying to survive when a war is
fought on your own land. Now we feel the
terror of the Iraqi farmer, the Afghani
shepherd, the Palestinian schoolkid. Now we
experience, in a thousand random cuts, the
hell that we’ve inflicted on the unmourned
and uncounted foreign dead in their
thousands and millions.
Will we make that connection? Will we
finally understand that what we do is what
our children learn? I’m doubtful. The
exceptionalism myth is very powerful. It’s a
variation on that oldest refrain, hubris.
And hubris doesn’t listen. As George Orwell
put it, “The nationalist not only does not
disapprove of atrocities committed by his
own side, he has a remarkable capacity for
not even hearing about them.”
Now, at home, we are forced to listen. But
will we hear? Reform must start with the
guns, of course. But it’s going to have to
go a lot further and deeper than that.
This article was originally published by "Information Clearing House" -
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